Infosys Engaging in Visa Fraud, Again, Former Employee Says

...Subash Thayyullathil, a 17-year Infosys employee, is bringing a lawsuit this week under the Trafficking Victims Protection Act, alleging that what the company did to him both before and after he complained amounts to labor trafficking in violation of federal law.

The information technology staffing giant brought workers over from India on B-1 business visitor visas who should’ve been on H-1B or L-1B guestworker visas, according to Thayyullathil’s complaint. B-1 visas allow holders to do things like attend conferences and meetings, but don’t allow work.

“Once I noticed that we had B-1 workers coming in doing the work, I knew this was illegal,” Thayyullathil told Bloomberg Law.

After he raised concerns about the practice with his superiors, Thayyullathil was given two weeks to relocate to India. Instead, he went on Family and Medical Leave Act leave and was fired when he returned.

“My work status was dependent on my employer, so I can’t work in the United States,” he told Bloomberg Law. Thayyullathil remains in the U.S. lawfully as a dependent of his wife, who’s on student visa.

The lawsuit, being filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas, also implicates communications and wiring supplier Anixter International Inc. , where Thayyullathil was working under an agreement between the two companies. Anixter knew of and condoned Infosys’s visa practices, he says...

...This is the fourth time that Yadav, who has two academic degrees and works as a manager at a consulting company, has tried to get to the U.S. He has a job waiting for him in the Bay Area if he can secure an H-1B visa. But he keeps getting rejected. And if it doesn’t work out this time — even with the help of Lord Balaji — he’s going to stop trying.

The effects of President Trump’s crackdown on foreign newcomers are particularly felt in Hyderabad, a city dense with visa recipients and hopefuls, where an American education and resume have long been held as status symbols and a ticket to a better life. Telangana, the surrounding Indian state, saw its economy grow 14 percent last year. But even considering India’s lower cost of living, the salary differences are stark: The average Google software engineer, for example, makes a base pay of $21,500 in Hyderabad, but about $121,400 in San Francisco, according to Glassdoor, the job-reviews site...

...He was eating dinner with his girlfriend in Indiana in December when he got an email saying his H-1B extension had been denied. After he’d worked six years for the same client, the government decided that his job wasn’t “specialized” enough to warrant a high-skilled visa. The same extension application, he said, had been accepted just three years before.

Such denials are becoming common, as immigration officials follow orders to tighten up the process...

Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp., the biggest U.S. sponsor of H-1B visas for foreign information technology specialists, says a civil rights lawsuit accusing the firm of bias against workers who aren’t from India is all wrong.

Three former employees claim they were forced out of their jobs and replaced with “less qualified” South Asians after being poorly treated by their Indian supervisors and colleagues, given unjustifiably low performance ratings and denied promotions...

...Cognizant received 29,000 H1-B visas last year, according to Homeland Security Department data, about twice as much as Tata Consultancy Services Ltd., second on the list. The biggest U.S. technology companies, such as Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp., and Google Inc., are much further down the list with fewer than 5,000 sponsored visas each.

TCS may have to face a class-action trial later this year in Oakland, California, by American workers who claim they lost their jobs because the company is biased in favor of South Asian IT employees. The same Washington law firm representing the workers from TCS and Cognizant is pressing similar claims against Infosys Ltd. and Wipro Ltd., two other IT outsourcing firms.

TCS, Infosys and Wipro are all based in India. Cognizant’s headquarters is in Teaneck, New Jersey.

...This stranglehold on foreign workers enables firms to pay low wages. Academics with industry funding claim otherwise, but one can see how it makes basic economic sense: If a worker is not a free agent in the labor market, she cannot swing the best salary deal. And while the industry’s clout gives it bipartisan congressional support concerning H-1B and green card policy, Congress’s own commissioned report found that H-1B workers “received lower wages, less senior job titles, smaller signing bonuses and smaller pay and compensation increases than would be typical for the work they actually did.”..

...Another dirty little secret in all this is that the H-1B program is an enabler of rampant age discrimination in the tech industry. Age is actually one of the core issues in H-1B. Mind you, we are talking about age 35 as being “old” here, not 55. Almost all the H-1Bs are young, and younger is cheaper. And young H-1Bs are even cheaper than young Americans.

Age gives employers an excuse to shun American applicants, on the grounds that a given job opening requires only three to five years of experience, rendering the Americans “overqualified.” Or the employer will load the job description with unnecessary requirements, making the Americans simultaneously under- and overqualified. That doesn’t leave much room, does it?..

The Trump administration is tightening the rules for companies that contract out high-skilled workers who are in this country on H-1B visas.

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency issued a new policy memo on Thursday that requires "detailed statements of work or work orders" about the work that will be performed when an H-1B visa worker is employed at a third-party work site. Employers will have to file more details that support the need for foreign talent.

H-1B visas are controversial. American tech companies use them to hire highly skilled foreign workers, such as engineers, IT specialists, architects among others, in situations in which they say there is a shortage of U.S.-born talent. The visas are good for three years and renewable for another three-year term.

Critics of the visas — 85,000 of which are issued every year — say American workers are aced out of competition with workers who can be paid less.

As CNN reports, "Indian outsourcing firms will be the hardest hit. Indian workers receive more than 70% of all H-1B visas."

"...One more lie is that we even have a shortage of technical workers (this is what the Obama Administration liked to claim). What we have is a shortage of technical workers who will accept shit wages.

...You see the point of this H-1B reform will be mainly to get rid of the Indian outsourcers so their H-1B slots can be used by American companies hiring directly. It’s for this reason that the Indian companies are hiring U.S. citizens as fast as they can. And the U.S. companies are preparing, too, by practicing all those techniques that will allow them to appear to seek qualified domestic candidates and yet not find them. Toward that end, for example, I’m hearing that one big company that rhymes with IBM is starting to use recruiters whose native language is not English. This is not to say that non-native speakers can’t learn wonderful English or be consummate H.R. professionals, but the track record of big companies that rhyme with IBM is not good in this area.

For all their billions in profits (and billions more in repatriated profits) these companies, which include biggies like Apple and Google, just can’t seem to bring themselves to pay market rates for labor if they can wriggle out of doing so. The Trump Administration sure isn’t going to make them do it, either. And for these reasons I predict that the H-1B visa program may change in 2018 but its problems will remain pretty much the same."

Good points, as usual from the Center for Immigration Studies:

...Let's change the dialogue and simultaneously remove thousands of smaller H-1B employers from the arena. Let's talk about the raw ethnic and gender discrimination, which is part and parcel of the H-1B program. Let's make this a civil rights issue, the rights of Americans to have American jobs, and of women to have them, too.

My proposal: No employer with more than 100 H-1B employers may secure the H-1B extensions they want (with certain rational exceptions) unless their H-1B work force contains no more than 25 percent of the workers drawn from a single country, and a 40 percent female work force in the H-1B occupations.

The rational exceptions: Any employer wanting an H-1B extension for a woman, or for a worker other than from the nation of origin favored by the employer (typically India) would get that extension.

So we would not be denying all extensions (attractive though that would be), we would be only denying extensions to large-scale employers of H-1Bs who currently discriminate on the basis of ethnicity, gender, or both.

Only the discriminators would be denied extensions.

In the future, extensions for the previously favored workers would be available to the employer once the nation-of-preference ratio fell to 25 percent and once the participation by women reached 40 percent. There would need to be a system of credits should the employer replace H-1Bs with U.S. workers (who would have to be paid at least 110 percent or more of the wages of the departing H-1Bs.) I have not yet worked out a mechanism for that requirement.

The discrimination being discussed, as we reported earlier, is not just in favor of people from India, it is not just in favor of males from India, it is not even discrimination in favor of young males from India, it is discrimination in favor of young Indian males from a few states in the south of the country. Many big H-1B employers have more than 97 percent of their H-1Bs from India; a few have even higher percentages of Indians.

This 25 percent requirement would force those using massive numbers of these young Indian males to say that the "best and brightest" come from only a sliver of the world, and that the existing discrimination in favor of those young Indian males was in the best interest of the American economy. That puts the exploitative H-1B employers in a truly awkward position. It will be harder for them to defend their discriminatory practices than simply making the tired old pitch that Americans really can't do high tech work.

Given the current hiring practices of so many big H-1B employers, the number of extensions granted would be minimal and program as a whole would shrink, but only for those big employers who are currently discriminating.

This suggestion of mine would set off loud voices from New Delhi, who will decry what they regard as discrimination against their people; what it will be is the lessening of pro-Indian discrimination in this particular part of the economy...

Desperate, unqualified slumdog students are flooding the IT job market. From Mother Jones...

Inside the Growing Guest Worker Program Trapping Indian Students in Virtual Servitude

And how American universities are acting as willing partners.

...According to data I requested under the Freedom of Information Act, UCM ranked 26th in the number of approved OPTs in the workforce since 2011, behind elite schools like Columbia and Carnegie Mellon. But also ahead of UCM in the rankings was Northwestern Polytechnic University, a California school that BuzzFeed exposed in 2016 for enrolling thousands of foreign students—making up 99 percent of its student body—but having no full-time, permanent faculty. While graduates from name-brand schools frequently found their way to Fortune 500 companies like Goldman Sachs, Microsoft, Google, and Apple, UCM graduates seem indistinguishable from those who attended Northwestern Polytechnic—both often move straight from the classroom to obscure tech firms.

As UCM’s Indian population has surged, problems with the OPT program have emerged. Promatrix Corp.—a New Jersey firm that sent representatives to a UCM career fair in the spring of 2015—was ensnared in an elaborate sting operation set up by the US government in which federal agents created a fake school, the University of Northern New Jersey, to trap companies misusing the student visa system. In early 2016, the Justice Department brought a complaint against the firm’s CEO and managing director, Tejesh Kodali, and another employee for conspiracy to commit visa fraud and harbor immigrants for profit. Kodali pleaded guilty to a visa fraud conspiracy charge in late 2016.

There’s no legal obligation for schools to vet employers recruiting on campus, according to Edwin Koc of the National Association of Colleges and Employers, the professional association for career service counselors. And in the case of public universities, these counselors have to be careful to avoid discriminating against a particular type of firm.

With little oversight from their institutions, students can land at body shops like SCM Data and MMC Systems, two East Coast firms that were accused by a Homeland Security agent in a 2015 court case of coaching students to lie to the govern­ment about their work to obtain H-1B visas. Court documents also claim that the companies failed to pay some guest workers, despite promises of $27 an hour.

Prathiba Kalyan, a New Jersey-based staffing specialist who places body-shop consultants with her clients, says the OPTs she has encountered are “just left out to fend for themselves. These institutions that are just spewing out these degrees aren’t making any attempt to give them a career path.”

When I asked UCM’s dean of international affairs, Joseph Lewandowski, about the high number of alumni ending up at body shops, he called the trend “alarming.” But UCM isn’t alone. A computer science professor at Central Michigan University said approving students’ applications for OPT at the school amounted to double-­checking to make sure that forms were filled out correctly. “All I needed was a piece of paper from an employer,” the professor told me. “They didn’t even have to tell me how much money they were paying. They just had to tell me they’re employed.”

In 2015, Central Michigan awarded more than 150 master’s degrees in computer science, three times more than it had handed out the year prior. Nearly 85 percent of them went to international students, the bulk from India. According to department chair Pat Kinnicutt, the school temporarily offered in-state tuition to foreign students and didn’t require a minimum score on the GRE. The floodgates opened. In 2016, it rescinded both perks.

“The large number of students definitely impacted the quality of education—lowered it,” Kinnicutt said. Unsurprisingly, almost all students took opportunities to work in the United States, including via OPT. “All our students do get jobs,” he said.

Shares of Infosys Ltd. fell as much as 7.6 percent, the most since November 2016 on an intraday basis, after it said Vishal Sikka has resigned as chief executive officer and will become the company’s executive vice chairman. Sikka cited a continuous stream of distractions and disruptions, as well as false and increasingly personal attacks, according to his resignation email to the company’s board.

San Jose Businesswoman Pleads Guilty To Tech Worker Visa Fraud

SAN JOSE, CA - A San Jose businesswoman pleaded guilty in federal court today to three counts of visa fraud, announced U.S. Attorney Brian J. Stretch Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) Special Agent in Charge Ryan L. Spradlin. The guilty plea was accepted by the Honorable Lucy H. Koh, U.S. District Judge.

In pleading guilty, Sridevi Aiyaswamy, 50, of San Jose, admitted that between April 2010 and June 2013 she made numerous false statements, and submitted over 25 fraudulent documents, to the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) for the purpose of obtaining H-1B non-immigrant classifications for skilled foreign workers. Acting as a petitioner on behalf of foreign worker beneficiaries, Aiyaswamy falsely represented in I-129 petitions that the foreign worker beneficiaries would be working at Cisco, an information technology and networking company in San Jose, Calif. Aiayswamy further submitted counterfeit statements of work with forged signatures as back-up documentation to the I-129 petitions. In fact, at the time she submitted these documents to USCIS, Aiyaswamy knew that the statements regarding offers of work from Cisco for these beneficiaries were false statements, and that Cisco had not made any offers of employment regarding these individuals.

A federal grand jury indicted Aiyaswamy on December 3, 2015, charging her with 34 counts of visa fraud, in violation of 18 U.S.C. § 1546(a). Pursuant to today’s pea agreement, Aiyaswamy pleaded guilty to three of the counts of visa fraud and the government agreed to request dismissal of the remaining counts.

Aiyaswamy is currently free on bond. Judge Koh scheduled her sentencing for November 15, 2017, at 9:15 a.m. The maximum statutory penalty for visa fraud is 10 years in prison and a $250,000 fine. However, any sentence following conviction will be imposed by the court only after consideration of the U.S. Sentencing Guidelines and the federal statute governing the imposition of a sentence, 18 U.S.C. § 3553.

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